Joseph Harris (2) (1940–)

In my copy of this book, the title on the cover looks like a blue sticker placed over a patterned board. Maybe they got the wrong sticker.

From its title, you would think that this collection is about the relationship between ballads and oral literature. One of those syntactic units is right: Almost everything in the book involves oral literature. Another is half right: about half the essays are devoted at least in part to ballads. But the "and" is missing. If half the essays are about ballads, that means half of them aren't, and only a few actually discuss the relationship between ballads and other genres.

If you realize that from the start (I didn't), you'll probably get more out of the book. Several essays, for instance, discuss the relationship between the print and oral traditions of particular stories. One looks at the famous ballad of "The Gypsy Laddie" and tries (unsuccessfully, to my mind) to wring more history out of it. One tries to trace links between ballads and the works of more mainstream poets.

There is a lot of interesting work here. But it seems to me that the interest is far more to students of literature -- especially international medieval literature -- than folk songs scholars. If that's what you want, then you can rely on the results to be well-researched and well-presented. Whether they are actually right is left as an exercise for the reader.… (mehr)